After having taken a little Christmas food for the poor, Christmas trees were bought, properly and nicely decorated, brought into the hospital, and the lights turned on. Why? Because I was making it cozy for so many who were sick.īefore Christmas there was, of course, cleaning to do here as well as in their home.īy Christmas Eve, everything was clean and ready for the great feast. Translation: How We Celebrated Christmas at the United Church Deaconess Home in ChicagoĬhristmas here was very nice, indeed, dare I say, more cozy than I’ve known it before. Setting the Stage Fergus Falls, Otter Tail County, and Madison, Lac Qui Parle County, Minnesota The ArticlesĬhristmas at the Deaconess Home in Chicago Lovell, Norwegian Newspapers in America: Connecting Norway and the New Land, (Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010), ix. “About Chronicling America,” Library of Congress ( /about/ : accessed 20 July 2020.) Welcome to the daily life of Pauline Braaten. They reveal a devout young woman, committed to aid the suffering of others. These articles shed invaluable light on her daily life during those years, particularly the years she spent as a Deaconess sister and nurse. One of the wonderful things about small-town newspapers is that they are able to write about mundane events of daily life in ways that big-city newspapers cannot. The first was in 1889, when the serious illness of a child in the Braaten household was reported, and the last was in 1912, when her husband, Charles Hovick, paid a visit to her mother. Tusen takk to Britta Augdahl who helped polish up my translations.ĭuring the early years of her life, my grandmother appeared in Fergus Falls newspapers nineteen times. The results are a bit awkward at times in English, but it retains a flavor of the Norwegian language. I have tried to retain some of the sentence structure from the original Norwegian. Norwegian-language newspapers of the time were printed using a florid Gothic script and written in an archaic, highly Danish-influenced form of Norwegian. You can find articles that mention Mikkel here and Mathea here.Ī few notes on what you will be seeing. The articles that follow are those that mention (or refer to indirectly) their daughter (and my maternal grandmother) Inger Pauline. With this new technological advance, searching for my great-grandparents, Mikkel Mikkelsen Braaten (1834–1901) and Gunhild Mathea Johannesdatter Pedersen Braaten (1844–1921), brought up more than I had hoped for. (The Fergus Falls Daily Journal, the English-language newspaper, is not yet searchable, so the tidbits about our family it may contain are still unknown.) And luckily, the Ugeblad and the Rodhuggeren are now available. This ongoing project is digitizing and making searchable historic, out-of-print newspapers from across the country. That all changed when I learned about Chronicling America at the Library of Congress. But, given the available technology (microfilm), the only way to find out would have required a laborious page-by-page, column-by-column search-a practical impossibility, particularly as I knew absolutely no Norwegian at the time (well, besides uff da). I wondered if my ancestors had ever been mentioned in those pages. Inger Pauline Braaten Hovick (1884–1975) Introductionĭuring my first visit to the Otter Tail County Historical Society in 2016, I learned that Fergus Falls had had two Norwegian-language newspaper, the Fergus Falls Ugeblad (Weekly Magazine), published from 1883 to 1946, and the Rodhuggeren (The Radical), published from 1893 to 1898. These articles reveal a devout young woman committed to aid the suffering of others. The Fergus Falls Ugeblad – the Weekly Norwegian-Language Newspaper of Fergus Falls, Minnesota Mathea Braaten (inset)
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